I knew a veteran of World War II who offered me some advice on pride. But before his advice, here is just a bit of clarity on who this gentleman was. He was a many times decorated former Navy Beachmaster. Don’t know what a Beachmaster is? He landed in the very first party of an amphibious assault and got it all organized amidst the shelling, machine guns, and assaults. His duty was to walk around the beachhead while the Japanese were trying hard to kill him specifically and get everything ordered for the attack. Many of his peers did not make it.
His family was eager to see any revelations as we progressed through several sittings. He hadn’t shared with them any of his wartime experiences. This was the first time they had heard of any of it. I was familiar with this situation. My father had been torpedoed twice, and my uncle had served in the Navy at D-Day. Little or nothing had been said about these things. There was no plumping up of incidents; rather, there was no telling of incidents at all. It was only at a family dinner after my father died that while shopping for dinner, I picked up a bag of frozen succotash and was told by my older sister that the reason it was never served in our house was that succotash was what the cook was serving the night dad had been torpedoed for the second time.
At the end of my third interviewing session, I asked why he’d never told his family about his experiences. I fully expected that he’d mention the trauma and horror of the incidents. Instead, he said that when he’d come home from the war, he’d been eager to do more with his life, not to be defined by the war, and to be proud of other achievements.
It’s good advice.
While he was still sitting in front of the camera, dressed in his Navy dress uniform, I stood and gave him a full regulation salute, the only one I had offered to any Naval officer in many years.
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My uncles were the same. One of them had been in the Marine color guard in Tianjin when McArthur accepted the Japanese surrender. I didn’t even know this until I returned from China, went to see my aunt and uncle, and my uncle greeted me in Mandarin. My other uncle was in the Navy and had been on an island that supplied Guadalcanal. He didn’t talk about it because (as he said when I asked directly) “Well, Martha Ann, I was just lucky. Only one guy died in my outfit and that was his own fault. We had a movie one night, outside, and that old boy pulled out a bomb to sit on and it exploded.” All they carried with them (publicly) were the tattoos on their arms. I know a lot of guys came back with PTSD. My uncles talked about that once or twice, but generally, no. They knew why they were there and they didn’t look back — or so they said.